Religion Dispatches
…his Mormonism is not one of them. Harris-Perry wants to draw a clear line between evaluating a candidate and analyzing a candidate’s faith. In a lecture at the Danforth Center this fall, E.J. Dionne proposed a different solution: limit discussions of candidate’s faith to how this faith might influence his or her political perspective and policies. This would not include sacred underwear, seventy virgins, or transubstantiation. It does however inc…
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…9/11, Armageddon-anxious evangelicals have focused more on Russia’s Middle Eastern allies than Gog itself. Tim LaHaye, co-author of the best-selling Left Behind series, and Ed Hindson, Dean Emeritus of the divinity school at Liberty University, devoted much of their 2007 book Global Warning to framing Iran as an evil Islamic threat to Israel, and through Israel to Christianity. Like other evangelical apocalypticists such as Joel Rosenberg (author…
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…ran spent most of his life and career outside of the country of his birth. Between his last visit to Lebanon in 1910 and his untimely death in 1931, Gibran was for all intents and purposes American, part of a thriving immigrant community in first Boston and then New York, where he lived, painted, and wrote in a studio apartment on East 10th Street. Adapting Gibran’s most famous book into a narrative film won’t be easy, which is why it hasn’t been…
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…this view, has no intention of attacking Iran and starting another Middle East war, but it is willing to go to the brink to get the U.S. to act—and to act before the November elections. The Rabbinic consultation story broke over the weekend when a reporter for an Orthodox Jewish website Kikar HaShabbat wrote that Netanyahu’s emissary, National Security Chief Yaakov Amidor, met with the 91-year-old Rabbi on Friday afternoon. The choice of Rabbi Y…
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…ization of Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero; they thought he would speak better to Pope Francis’s commitment to the poor, the marginalized, and the migrant he spoke of before Congress on Thursday morning. Other friends posted about Native and mixed-race Americans who lived under the complicated legacies of Catholic-supported colonialism. They would remind readers that the dominant Catholicism of this hemisphere is not undertaken by worshippers o…
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…ion. I was in my teens when I found out there was supposed to be animosity between us. In high school, I learned about the split between Shi’as and Sunnis. I asked my parents what we were. They said, “Oh, we’re all the same, it doesn’t matter.” My father’s college roommate was Jewish American so our families celebrated holidays together every year. At 13, I’d heard the prayers so often I’d memorized them. I could have had my own Bat Mitzvah. I rea…
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…dom” through such dishonorable and dishonest campaigns as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (now concluded—hah!) and “Operation Enduring Freedom” (in which US service members continue to be killed and maimed in Afghanistan for no clear or compelling purpose). In 2003 Brooks found the anti-war slogan “No Blood for Oil!” not at all to his taste: to him that chant was simplistic, jejune, etc. Yet in the bigger picture, how can anyone now fail to see how thes…
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…has posed itself as Christian love, but is as far away from Christ as the East is from the West. We’re trying to figure out where the compassion is for women’s lives and the lived experiences that we have—regardless of race, class, or gender, social economic status, or even sexual orientation. None of those things seem to matter to this administration. The only thing that seems to matter to them is undoing some of the very important work that was…
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…nto tourists, every few days, who’d ask: “which way’s north?” Or south, or east, or west. I’d smile, and turn south, and point out the World Trade Center. I’d tell them: Just keep an eye on that, and you’ll always know where to go. But there was just smoke, and it stole more and more of the sky, overcoming that beautiful September morning with a sick smell. If Eid ul-Fitr falls on the anniversary of that day, it will be an especially difficult tas…
Read More…e. A four-alarm fire engulfed a 110-year-old synagogue on New York’s Upper East Side Monday night. The building was empty and under renovation at the time and the cause was unknown. A Manhattan judge threw out an ex-firefighter’s lawsuit attempting to stop the building of an Islamic center blocks away from Ground Zero. Facon offers Jews an option for making it through America’s “Bacon Boom.” Israeli “Freedom Riders” are women exercising their rig…
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